Cédric is a French olive farmer facing 5 years of prison and a 30.000 euro fine for helping hundreds of migrants cross into France and giving them shelter and he is completely unapologetic about it, saying: "Je risque la prison pour avoir aidé des migrants, je ne regrette rien et je continuerai". ("I am risking prison for having helped migrants, I regret nothing and I will continue""). For the boldness of his acts of solidarity and his speaking truth to power, the authorities now want him punished.
Nobody in the media seems to talk about migrant deaths and hardships anymore, influenced by the media spinning and fear mongering by right-wing politicians like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, we only get to hear about migrants and refugees being harassers, terrorists or criminals. But aside from the obvious fact (that shouldn't need to be made) that it is only a tiny minority that is involved in those sensationalized stories, the real crime here is the underreported fact that last year was the deadliest year yet for people crossing the Mediterranean, with almost 4.000 dying at Europe's militarized borders, making a UNHCR spokesperson state that it's "the worst we have ever seen."
The real crime isn't helping and sheltering people that survive the danger of crossing the border, but that European authorities round up thousands of those survivors every week, many of them minors, and dump them back across the border.
The real crime isn't defiantly expressing solidarity with refugees and migrants and acting on it, but that politicians from centre-left to far-right are competing to see who can take the toughest line on who can crack down on migrants the hardest, all to deflect anger from their own failed and unpopular social and economic policies.
Cédric is the opposite of a criminal. A farmer, a profession of which 1 in 3 make less than 350 euros per month in France and is done by mostly migrant workers nowadays, he said about his acts of helping African undocumented: "It's not up to me to make a distinction between black and white, people with or without papers. My job is feeding people and that's what I do."
Cédric shows us what solidarity looks like these days: like heroism. As the historian Howard Zinn reminds us, it's the small acts, multiplied by millions of ordinary people, that have transformed the world and will transform the world.
Asked by a judge, “Why do you do all this?”, Herrou responded:
“I did it because it had to be done. There are people dying on the side of the road, there are families suffering. It’s not right. History is written every day, and it's all of our duty to get up when things go wrong. I don't want to be ashamed twenty years from now."
He added in a speech to a crowd of supporters outside the courthouse: "What I do is not a sacrifice, it is an honor."
Thank you, Cédric Herrou. #JeSuisCedricHerrou
Val says this was a report I copied and now cannot find the writer to give credit. I will add it when I can find it.
